How to fry nuts perfectly

Any visit to Beijing - or to any good Beijing restaurant worth its salt, for that matter - will most likely lead to an encounter with something particularly addictive: aged vinegar peanuts. I've modified the traditional recipe a bit and am really happy with the result. A bowl of these beauties pretty much has everything going for it: it's crunchy, sweet, piquant, fresh, and salty all at the same time. 

And really, what is not to love? The nuts are gently fried to a perfect state of crispness, tossed with bright cubes of green onion, onion, and cucumbers, and finally bathed in a sweetened vinegar. Simplicity incarnate.

What I've done here is take the traditional recipe a couple of steps further. The onions and cukes are lightly salted to remove any moisture that could potentially threaten the absolute state of crunchitude that the peanuts possess. Second, red onions are used instead of white or yellow to add a bit of color to the scheme. (All of you chili heads out there can toss in some chopped fresh red chilies, of course, and neither garlic nor cilantro would be out of place here for those who love them.) Third, the vinegar is first simmered with the sugar and salt so that their graininess is dissolved, the tastes are perfectly balanced, and the sauce is given a chance to thicken so that it robes each nut with a gentle shellac.

Start the nuts in cold oil

You can use almonds instead of peanuts as I have done, just be sure that whatever nuts you use still have their skins on. The skin is desirable because it will wrinkle up as it fries, giving the nut the appearance of what is know as “tiger skin,” or hǔpí 虎皮, that delights the eye and contrasts so well with the other ingredients. The ridges and valleys on the skin will also act as tiny scoops to grab onto the sauce and hold it while you transport the glistening nut to your happy maw. What causes the sheath of a humble nut to turn into tiger skin is the expansion of the nut as it slowly fries, puffs up as the moisture cooks away, and then shrivels back down, leaving the skin to try to cover up a much smaller body. 

The secret to this dish is this: the nuts need to fry very slowly and they must be started in cool oil. The main mistake that folks make when frying nuts is that they start by heating the oil and then tossing in the raw nuts. But that doesn't allow the inside of the nut to fully cook before the exterior is burned, and what you do not want to have under any circumstances are burned nuts. If that happens, toss them out and start all over. So, use cool oil here, add the nuts to the oil before you turn on the heat, and then moderate the heat so that the nuts bubble merrily away without browning too quickly.

Chinese cuisine is full of little tips like that, things that seem so obvious once you parse them out, but ones that make all the difference in the world. Take this story for example...

Slowly fry the nuts

The story goes that a Chinese opera performer had problem: every time he played a general on stage and swung his spear, it would hit the fan of flags arrayed across his back. The performer tried and tried to figure out how to do this properly, but he never failed to whack at least one of the flags. It ruined his performances, and his audiences were losing patience. Desperate, he begged a famous opera master to reveal to him how he managed to swing his spear so effortlessly and always miss the flags. The star smiled and said that younger man would have to become his disciple, to wine and dine his new master and convincingly show his fealty before the request could be granted. 

The younger man leaped at this rare opportunity. He kowtowed to his new master with great ceremony and showered him with feasts and gifts, trying in every way to curry his favor. One day, at the end of a seemingly endless series of banquets, the younger man finally couldn’t wait any more. He pleaded with the master to at last show him his secret. 

The master picked his teeth for a while, and then finally nodded and removed the toothpick from his mouth. “Watch,” he ordered. He held the toothpick straight out from his belly like the haft of a spear, and then swung it slowly up around his face and back down to his belly, never taking his eyes off the tip of the toothpick. “That’s it?” the young man exclaimed, “just watch the tip?”

Every Chinese person (and just about everyone else) I know loves peanuts.  There’s a lot of Chinese recipes that call for fried or roasted peanuts, too, so I’ve tried just about everything to make the perfect peanut, and it wasn’t until I figured out this method that I hit the jackpot. It’s so easy that it seems almost silly to focus a recipe around it, but just as in the foregoing story, sometimes the magic is in the details.

Aged vinegar fried peanuts 
Lǎocù huāshēngmǐ 老醋花生米
Beijing

Thickened sauce

Makes about 3 cups

1 cup tasty dark vinegar (everyday balsamic recommended)
6 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons sea salt
¼ medium red onion, chopped (½ cup)
2 Persian or Japanese cucumbers, trimmed and chopped (1 cup)
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 pound fresh, raw peanuts or almonds in their skins
3 cups (or so) vegetable or peanut oil; used is all right as long as it smells fresh
2 green onions, trimmed and chopped (½ cup)
A small bunch of cilantro, chopped, optional
1 clove garlic, finely chopped, optional

1 fresh red chili, finely chopped, optional

1. Start by making the vinegar sauce: Bring the vinegar, sugar, and salt to a boil in a small saucepan and then reduce the heat to medium. Simmer the vinegar until it has reduced a bit and has thickened; the vinegar will look heavier at this point and will drip more slowly off of a spoon or rubber spatula. It will thicken up more as it cools down.

2. Place the onion and cucumbers in a sieve or colander, sprinkle them with the other teaspoon of salt, shake them all around, and let the veggies sweat while you prepare the rest of the dish.

3. Pour the oil in your wok and add the nuts to the oil. Warm up the oil and nuts over medium-high heat until the oil begins to bubble, and then lower the heat to medium. Stir the nuts often while they cook. You want to maintain a high enough heat that a white foam forms around the nuts, but not so hot that the nuts burn. Stir and cook until the nuts are toasted and golden brown. Taste one to make sure: it should taste nice and toasty. At this point the nuts are done, even if they are not crunchy, because that won't happen until they cool down. Use a slotted spoon or Chinese spider to scoop the nuts out of the hot oil into a work bowl lined with a couple of paper towels. Shake the nuts around in the bowl so that most of the oil gets sponged up by the towels, as this will allow the vinegar to cling to the nuts instead of sliding off. 

Makes me long for Beijing

4. When the nuts have cooled down, squeeze any liquid out of the onions and cucumbers and add them to the nuts. Add whatever other condiments you want, like cilantro, chili, and/or garlic, as well as however much of the vinegar sauce you like. Toss them all together and serve.

5. If you plan to serve this a lot later, keep the peanuts, sauce, and veggies separate so that they don't get all soggy. If you are only serving a couple of people, you can toss together the amount you want and refrigerate the rest.

Kung pao chicken

This is a dish that even most people who don't adore Chinese food tend to know and love. Kung Pao Chicken has been around for quite a while now here in the States -- at least from the Eighties, as far as I can remember -- so long that it's morphed into sort of a cliche in many restaurants. 

Some serve up really terrible versions that lack anything other than saltiness and peanuts, and that's too bad, because this is truly an inspired combination of sweet, sour, spice, heat, chicken, veggies, and -- yes -- peanuts. A signature dish of Sichuan province, this deserves some respect.

One place you can find it is in Fuchsia Dunlop's intensely wonderful Land of Plenty, which is not only a book of authentic Sichuan recipes, but also a memoir of her moving and (at times) quite funny months of being the first white woman to attend a cooking school in Chengdu. So, if you love Sichuan-style cooking, this is a great place to start.

Ground Sichuan peppercorns in marinade

Fuchsia has a lovely recipe for Kung Pao Chicken in her book, of course, and I adore it. Her version is all about the chicken, and she includes a story about how the story got its moniker: the dish was named after a late Qing dynasty governor of Sichuan called Ding Baozhen (as gongbao, or "kung pao," was his official title); he doted on this dish, so it got named after him. She goes on to relate the problems this caused the radicals during the Cultural Revolution, who renamed it until it was "rehabilitated" in the 1980s.

The story I heard was ever so slightly different. According to the food writer Huang Shaomo, Mr. Ding was the one who created this dish. (These names are particularly funny in Chinese because the title of this dish is Gongbao zhiding "Kung pao chicken cubes," and the creator's name is the name of this dish backwards, sort of: Ding Gongbao.) According to Mr. Huang, he used pretty much the same recipe for different main ingredients, so he had Kung Pao Lamb, Kung Pao Pork, Kung Pao Shrimp... you name it. 

But anyway, the variations on this story are probably as numerous as the recipes for this chicken dish. Fuchsia's version, like I said, focuses on the chicken, and other than the whites of some scallions, there really isn't a whole lot of vegetable matter in there. 

Plenty of veggies to add plenty of crunch

In my version, though, sweet red peppers and crunchy celery add all sorts of textural layers. This not only makes the dish quite colorful, but it also turns this into an ideal candidate for a one-dish supper: just pile the Kung Pao Chicken on top of a bowl of rice and settle down for a wonderful meal. Again, this is something that I personally like, and as with so many of these dishes, you too can play around with the ingredients to your heart's content until you find the balance that makes you smile.

I am not a huge fan, for example, of whole Sichuan peppercorns in stir-fries. These hard little nuggets tend to startle me out of my reveries whenever I bite down on them. So, what I've done is substitute ground toasted Sichuan peppercorns for the whole ones and add them to the marinade, and this adds just the right numbing edge for my taste. (But if you prefer them, well then, just add a teaspoon of the whole peppers to the chilies instead of the ground ones to the marinade.)

Also, I really love lots and lots of heat here, so I've doubled down on the dried chilies; they can be halved or reduced even further if you are not a chiliehead. If you prepare them the way that I suggest, you will find that they will soften and almost melt into the sauce as you work your way through the dish, which means that while you might start picking them out at the beginning, by dinner's end they will have slithered into the chicken and mellowed out.

One thing I suggest you do is to use kitchen shears or scissors to cut up the dried Thai chilies. This way, you can easily cut the chilies into small pieces without having them ricochet all over the kitchen. First, nip off the stem ends and then guillotine the chilies into half-inch sections. This loosens the seeds, which you can easily shake out the pods by lifting up the chilies and shaking them between your fingertips. 

An easy way with dried chilies

There's really nothing wrong with the seeds, if you prefer to keep them, of course. But I find that the seeds -- like the whole Sichuan peppercorns -- interfere with my enjoyment of a dish, so I dispense with them. This is all subjective, of course, and you should keep them in or toss them out as you see fit.

The final embellishment is fresh fried peanuts. Fuchsia talks about cashews as an elegant alternative, but I've never managed to get beyond peanuts. My peanut-loving husband would be very upset if anything ever derailed his chances for having peanuts for dinner, so there you have it. I imagine almonds and macadamia nuts might be splendid, too. But alas, I am destined to only speculate.

Kung pao chicken 
Gongbao jiding 宮保雞丁
Sichuan
Serves 2 as a main dish over rice, or 4 as part of a multicourse meal

Chicken:
12 ounces raw boneless chicken (boned and skinned thigh meat highly recommended; about 5 thighs)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 teaspoons Shaoxing rice wine
1 teaspoon toasted ground Sichuan peppercorns
2 teaspoons cornstarch

Sauce:
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon balsamic (or other good dark) vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar

Fry the dried peppers

1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon cornstarch

The rest:
½ red bell (sweet) pepper
3 stalks celery
6 green onions
4 cloves garlic
½ inch fresh ginger, peeled and minced
5 to 15 dried Thai chilies (I prefer the maximum)
4 tablespoons peanut or vegetable oil
½ cup fried peanuts, unsalted

1. Rinse the chicken, pat it dry, and cut it into ½-inch dice. Place the chicken in a small work bowl with the soy sauce, rice wine, ground Sichuan peppercorns, and cornstarch. Toss them together and let the chicken marinate while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

2. Mix together the sauce ingredients in a small bowl and set aside.

3. Cut the red bell pepper and celery into ½-inch dice. Cut the whites of the green onions into ½-inch rounds, and cut the green sections of two of the onions into ½-inch pieces for garnish. Lightly smash the garlic and chop it finely; add it to the ginger. Use kitchen shears as directed above to cut the dried chilies into ½-inch pieces, discarding the stem ends and the seeds. 

4. Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a wok over high and add the red bell pepper and celery to the wok. Quickly stir-fry them over high heat until the rawness is barely gone; remove them to the serving dish. 

5. Heat the rest of the oil in the wok over high and add the dried chili peppers; quickly fry them to release their aroma, about 10 seconds, and then add the garlic and ginger. Stir-fry these together for a few seconds and add the chicken. Stir-fry the chicken over high until the chicken turns white; add the whites of the onion. Continue to stir-fry the chicken until it is lightly browned and cooked through. Add the bell pepper and celery, toss, and then add the sauce. Quickly toss these together, and as soon as the sauce thickens, taste it and adjust the seasoning, and then add the peanuts and the green leaves of the onions. Serve immediately.

Northern style stewed peanuts

Peanuts may have originated in the New World, but they have become so beloved throughout China that they seem to have always been a part of the cuisine.

No matter where you travel in China -- from the extreme north to the most tropical south, in everything from street foods to the most refined banquet -- peanuts are a vital part of the local offerings. And with little wonder: they are delicious in just about every dish, savory or sweet.

We're all familiar with fried and roasted peanuts, but here you will find another treatment of these little guys that acknowledges their innate bean nature: boiling. Cooking peanuts in liquid is a revelation. The taste, texture, and aroma take on characteristics different from anything else.

And nobody does it better than in North China.

Slowly stewed in a classic broth of soy sauce and aromatics with just a touch of sweetness, this is sheer perfection. Not only that, but it is one of the simplest dishes you can toss together, requiring only that you put everything in a pan and simmer away until the peanuts are just barely soft and full of flavor.

Once you have tried this, you'll be tempted to make larger batches. Give in to this temptation. Stored in the refrigerator in a glass jar, they will keep for many days, thanks to the salt in the soy sauce. 

Do note that peeled peanuts are called for, meaning that the thin red skin has been removed. You can, of course, use regular peanuts with their skins on, but they will not help the dish in any way. Rather, they turn into bitter little rags that detract from rather than help the flavors. So, seek out ones that are naked and white.

Shandong's peeled peanuts

The only real requirement is that the peanuts be fresh. Stale peanuts will never taste good, no matter how delicious the sauce is. Health food stores sometimes offer peeled peanuts in their bulk bins, and this gives you the opportunity to smell them before you buy them. 

Another good choice is a busy Chinese market, since this helps with fast turnover. I've used the brand on the right, which is pretty good, as it hails from peanut-obsessed Shandong, China. 

However, the best peanuts I've ever tasted are from Penghu (The Pescadores Islands) off of Taiwan. Something about the rocky soil and sea air make these nuts absolute perfection. They are small in size, big in flavor, and the skins are dark red; if you only find them unpeeled, get them anyway and make Fried Peanuts. Served with beer, these are the best cocktail snacks ever.

Northern style stewed peanuts 
Beifangshi lu huasheng 北方式滷花生  
Northern China

Makes around 2 cups

12 ounces skinned peanuts

¼ cup regular soy sauce

¼ cup rice wine

2 tablespoon sugar

3 whole star anise

¼ stick cinnamon

1 tablespoon Sichuan peppercorns

3 slices ginger

Filtered water 

Roasted sesame oil, optional

1. Rinse the peanuts and place them in a saucepan with the soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, star anise, cinnamon, Sichuan peppercorns, and ginger. Add enough water to cover the peanuts by about half an inch.

2. Bring the pan to a boil over high heat and then lower the heat to medium. Simmer the peanuts for about 10 minutes, skimming off any scum that rises to the surface. 

3. Lower the heat to medium-low, so that the pan is barely simmering. Cook the peanuts slowly, adding water as needed to cover the peanuts. After about 45 minutes, start testing the peanuts every 5 minutes to see whether they are done. Bite into one; it should have no raw taste and ought to rumble easily without any crunch, but don't overcook them into mushiness. 

4. Quickly raise the heat to high and boil down the liquid until only about ¼ cup of liquid remains. Cool the peanuts to room temperature and either serve with a little dribble of sesame oil, if you wish, or refrigerate in a covered container.

Tips

Use peeled peanuts, rather than ones with their skins on.

Freshness is key here, so buy your peanuts from a health food store or a busy Chinese market.

Vary the seasonings as you like, adding or omitting spices, using green onions or garlic, and tossing the cooked peanuts in flavored "bright oils."

Keep an eye on the amount of liquid in the pan, as the peanuts will burn if the water boils off.

Beijing's aged vinegar peanuts

Any visit to Beijing - or to any good Beijing restaurant worth its salt, for that matter - will most likely lead to an encounter with something particularly addictive: aged vinegar peanuts.  I've modified the traditional recipe a bit and am really happy with the result. A bowl of these beauties pretty much has everything going for it: it's crunchy, sweet, piquant, fresh, and salty all at the same time. 

And really, what is not to love? The nuts are gently fried to a perfect state of crispness, tossed with bright cubes of green onion, onion, and cucumbers, and finally bathed in a sweetened vinegar. Simplicity incarnate.

What I've done here is take the traditional recipe a couple of steps further. The onions and cukes are lightly salted to remove any moisture that could potentially threaten the absolute state of crunchitude that the peanuts possess. Second, red onions are used instead of white or yellow to add a bit of color to the scheme. (All of you chili heads out there can toss in some chopped fresh red chilies, of course, and neither garlic nor cilantro would be out of place here for those who love them.) Third, the vinegar is first simmered with the sugar and salt so that their graininess is dissolved, the tastes are perfectly balanced, and the sauce is given a chance to thicken so that it robes each nut with a gentle shellac.

Secret: start the nuts in cool oil

I've been on a bit of an almond tear lately, so I've substituted almonds here instead of the usual peanuts. Either one will do as long as they a) are absolutely fresh, b) have skins, and c) are absolutely fresh. 

The skin is preferable here because it will wrinkle up as it fries, giving the nut the appearance of tiger skin, or hu pi, that delights the eye and contrasts so well with the other ingredients. The ridges and valleys on the skin will also act as tiny scoops to grab onto the sauce and hold it while you transport the glistening nut to your happy maw. What causes the sheath of a humble nut to turn into tiger skin is the expansion of the nut as it slowly fries, puffs up as the moisture cooks away, and then shrivels back down, leaving the skin to try to cover up a much smaller body. 

This is, admittedly, my own take on a traditional recipe, which just tosses fried nuts with aged dark vinegar, some sugar, and perhaps some tasty condiments like the ones suggested here. But l particularly like the mellowness that cooking the vinegar first provides, and any leftover sauce can be used to drizzle on meat, eggs, veggies, or what have you. Plus, I adore the contrasts in color, texture, and flavor that all these veggies and seasonings provide.

But veggies and vinegar aside, the star of this particular show are the nuts, and the secret to this dish is this: the nuts need to fry very slowly and they must be started in cool oil.  The main mistake that folks make when frying nuts is that they start by heating the oil and then tossing in the raw nuts. But that doesn't allow the inside of the nut to fully cook before the exterior is burned, and what you do not want to have under any circumstances are burned nuts. If that happens, toss them out and start all over. So, use cool oil here, add the nuts to the oil before you turn on the heat, and then moderate the heat so that the nuts bubble merrily away without browning too quickly.

Bubbles from the slow fry

Chinese cuisine is full of little tips like that, things that seem so obvious once you parse them out, but ones that make all the difference in the world. Take this story for example...

The story goes that a Chinese opera performer had problem: every time he played a general on stage and swung his spear, it would hit the fan of flags arrayed across his back.  The performer tried and tried to figure out how to do this properly, but he never failed to whack at least one of the flags.  It ruined his performances, and his audiences were losing patience.  Desperate, he begged a famous opera master to reveal to him how he managed to swing his spear so effortlessly and always miss the flags.  The master smiled and said that younger man would have to become his disciple, to wine and dine his new master and convincingly show his fealty before the request could be granted. 

The younger man leaped at this rare opportunity.  He kowtowed to his new master with great ceremony and showered him with feasts and gifts, trying in every way to curry his favor.  One day, at the end of a seemingly endless series of banquets, the younger man finally couldn’t wait any more.  He pleaded with the master to at last show him his secret. 

Thickened vinegar sauce

The master picked his teeth for a while, and then finally nodded and removed the toothpick from his mouth.  “Watch,” he ordered.  He held the toothpick straight out from his belly like the haft of a spear, and then swung it slowly up around his face and back down to his belly, never taking his eyes off the tip of the toothpick.  “That’s it?” the young man exclaimed, “just watch the tip?”

Every Chinese person (and just about everyone else) I know loves peanuts.  There’s a lot of Chinese recipes that call for fried or roasted peanuts, too, so I’ve tried just about everything to make the perfect peanut, and it wasn’t until I figured out this method that I hit the jackpot.  It’s so easy that it seems almost silly to focus a recipe around it, but just as in the foregoing story, sometimes the magic is in the details.

Aged vinegar fried peanuts 
Laocu huashengmi  老醋花生米   
Beijing

Makes about 3 cups

1 cup tasty dark vinegar (balsamic recommended)

6 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons sea salt

¼ medium red onion, chopped (½ cup)

2 Persian or Japanese cucumbers, trimmed and chopped (1 cup)

1 teaspoon sea salt

1 pound fresh, raw peanuts or almonds

3 cups (or so) vegetable or peanut oil; used, fresh-smelling oil okay here

2 green onions, trimmed and chopped (½ cup)

A small bunch of cilantro, chopped, optional

1 clove garlic, finely chopped, optional

1. Start by making the vinegar sauce:  Bring the vinegar, sugar, and salt to a boil in a small saucepan and then reduce the heat to medium. Simmer the vinegar until it has reduced a bit and has thickened; the vinegar will look heavier at this point and will drip more slowly off of a spoon or rubber spatula. It will thicken up more as it cools down.

2. Place the onion and cucumbers in a sieve or colander, sprinkle them with the other teaspoon of salt, shake them all around, and let the veggies sweat while you prepare the rest of the dish.

Nutty perfection

3. Pour the oil in your wok and add the nuts to the oil. Heat up the oil and nuts over medium-high heat until the oil begins to bubble, and then lower the heat to medium. Stir the nuts often while they cook. You want to maintain a high enough heat that a white foam forms around the nuts, but not so hot that the nuts burn. Stir and cook until the nuts are toasted and golden brown. Taste one to make sure: it should taste nice and toasty. At this point the nuts are done, even if they are not crunchy, because that won't happen until they cool down. Use a slotted spoon or Chinese spider to scoop the nuts out of the hot oil into a work bowl lined with a couple of  paper towels. Shake the nuts around in the bowl so that most of the oil gets sponged up by the towels, as this will allow the vinegar to cling to the nuts instead of sliding off. 

4. When the nuts have cooled down, squeeze any liquid out of the onions and cucumbers and add them to the nuts. Add whatever other condiments you want, like cilantro, chili, and/or garlic, as well as as much of the vinegar sauce as you like. Toss them all together and serve.

5. If you plan to serve this a lot later, keep the peanuts, sauce, and veggies separate so that they don't get all soggy. If you are only serving a couple of people, you can toss together only as much of the ingredients as you want and refrigerate the rest.